In her first year on the faculty of the UW law school, Anita Ramasastry was
named Teacher of the Year by the Student Bar Association. Now in her second
year, she's topped that with a 1998 Distinguished Teaching Award. How did one
so young hit the heights so fast?

The answer, surprisingly, is experience. Although she's only been an official
faculty member for two years, Ramasastry has been teaching much longer than
that.

"I'm convinced it's a calling," Ramasastry says with a laugh. "It's the one
thing I've been consistently good at."

Ramasastry began college at Harvard. During two summer terms she taught in a
special program for junior high and high school students. The course she
taught, appropriately enough, was law-related.

Although she chose to enter law school rather than take the academic path to a
doctoral degree, Ramasastry didn't stop teaching. She was a teaching fellow in
both the government and history departments at Harvard and taught legal writing
to first-year law students.

"When I first went to law school I thought I wanted to be an immigration
lawyer, but inside six months I'd decided I wanted to be a professor,"
Ramasastry says.

Inspired by her first-year professors, Ramasastry was disappointed with some of
the rest of law school because of large classes where she didn't participate.
"I decided that I would never let my students be disengaged that way," she
says.

Not much chance of that. In Ramasastry's first year contracts class, students
learn concepts by participating in simulations, negotiations, mock trials, even
by staging game shows.

The technique is a hit with her students. A letter signed by 20 of them says,
"Using such techniques, Professor Ramasastry not only established a clear
analytical framework for the entire course, she made the otherwise dry subject
matter fun and interesting."

Which sort of summarizes Ramasastry's philosophy of teaching. "If you can make
learning fun, you can push students to work hard and they'll respond," she
says. "They won't even be aware that you've turned so much responsibility over
to them."--Nancy Wick, UW News and Information